


Nostalgia

by apolesen



Category: Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: EDA: Father Time, Earth arc, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 07:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apolesen/pseuds/apolesen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor takes Miranda stargazing, and thinks of home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nostalgia

The past ninety years, the Doctor had always stargazed alone. Like a pious man might resent the presence of a culturally curious atheist in church, he found he could not bear the watch the stars when there were other people around. Even when he met someone he liked, even felt an affinity to, he still did not feel he could share the night-sky with them. The stars, more than anything on this world, held a special meaning to him. As far back as his memories went, it had always captivated him in a way nothing else had. Many an evening, he had walked away from the lights, head thrown back to see the stars emerge from the darkness. Even with his faulty memory, he could recall countless night-skies. 

He remembered the autumn of 1940, and walking through Hyde Park. He knew there would be an air-raid, and the search-lights were bound to be turned on soon, but for now, he could see the galaxies above. That song on the wireless had got it wrong, he reflected. No, they can’t black out the moon, but the moon was nothing compared to the stars. He remembered that time in Thailand when he had snuck out of the monastery late at night and walked up the mountain. He had lain down in the grass, his robes wrapped around him as a cocoon against the cold, as he picked out the southern constellations from the host of stars. 

But the Doctor could not remember a time like this, as these had been none. When he had heard that a meteor shower was coming, it was clear to him that they would watch it together. That evening, he was so impatient for the sun to set that he could not settle down to do anything. Miranda sat in the other side of the sofa reading, up until he decided that they should go, even if it was not quite getting dark yet. The Doctor drove the old Trabant out of town, past the places where people had crowded to watch the sky. At long last, they found a field with no lights and no people nearby. They left the car at the road-side and walked onto the field. The sky above them was dark now, but patches of grey betrayed the position of the clouds. 

‘Perhaps it’s too cloudy,’ Miranda said and slipped her hand into his. He just squeezed it as a response, and they continued in silence. Finally they stopped and turned their heads up. Miranda unfolded the blanket she had brought and draped it over her shoulders. The Doctor thought briefly that he should have told her to bring a jumper, but that mundane thought was shunted aside almost at once. What if she was right? Perhaps the cloud-cover was too thick, and they would not see anything at all... That idea made the Doctor ache. _Pain for home,_ he thought. _Nostalgia. In the late eighteenth century, homesickness was regarded as a medical condition. According to that line of thinking, I am certainly ill._ He had suspected that his origin was somewhere beyond this planet for over forty years, simply because he did not seem to belong anywhere on Earth, but it was still a strange thought, a little to fantastical to really be believed. 

‘There!’ Miranda called out. He looked up towards where she pointed. A gap had opened in the clouds, revealing the sky beyond. The stars were white specks against the blackness. The clouds moved and thinned. Just for a moment, a vertical streak of silver could be seen. Miranda pressed his arm. The Doctor felt a joy so sudden that it made his hearts jump. 

As the sky grew clear, they lay down in the grass. He did not care that his clothes would get damp, but made Miranda keep the blanket. She wrapped it around herself, much like he had wrapped himself in his saffron robes twenty-five years ago. As she propped her head against his shoulder, he put an arm around her. In silence, they watched the falling stars showering down. Occasionally, they would point upwards, to draw the other’s attention, or nudge each other in appreciation. That was enough. As they lay there, Miranda seemed younger than she really was, gone small against the cold of the night and childish at the joy of the stars. For a moment, the Doctor thought he recalled another meteor shower in another sky, where the colours were all different. Then he had been the child, lying beside his father in the red grass... 

But grass was green, not red. The memory slipped away again. 

As the falling stars streaked the sky, the Doctor tried to follow them with his eyes. They were too fast, of course, there one moment and gone the next. Some were silvery, scalpel-thin cuts in the darkness, which healed at once. Others were golden and grainy, a messy horisontal brush-stroke which dissolved into the sky. They were beautiful, but it was the stars on the firmament that filled him with awe. What would it be like, to walk through them? Was one of those specks of light the place where he had been born? Could Miranda’s home be seen from here, with the naked eye? 

‘Where would you go, dad?’ Miranda whispered. 

_Everywhere,_ he thought. She must have known, or heard, because she nuzzled into his shoulder and said: 

‘Me too.’ 

As his daughter fell asleep on his arm, the Doctor watched the stars from planet Earth, and ached for home.


End file.
